Monthly Archives: September 2018

A cynic might think that it suits the government to create confusion about pay increases, but whatever your view, it’s clear that this year’s changes have been complex. After years of fairly simple – if small – changes to pay, the soundbites surrounding this year’s changes along with the strange calculations about how it’s worked out have led to some confusion which I’m attempting to clear up here:

Extra funding

The DfE doesn’t have enough detail about which teachers earn what to allow it to make exact calculations at a school level. Having announced that it would fund any increase over 1%, the calculations are not that straightforward. The ‘estimate’ they have used has been calculated by working out roughly how much it will cost nationally, and then sharing the money out between schools based on their size.

This means that a typical 420-pupil primary school will be given an additional sum of nearly £12,000 for the whole year, which is intended to cover the additional increase.

Of course, if that school has lots of staff on the upper and leadership scales who only get the 2%/1.5% rise, it may cover all the costs over 1%; if they have lots of staff on main scale who should be getting 3.5%, it may not.

Which pay points are increasing.

Many people are reporting that only teachers at the bottom/top of each pay scale have been given a pay rise by the government. This is a confusion that stems from a misunderstanding about teachers pay. For 5 years now, the government has only set out minimum and maximum rates for each pay scale. Although as teachers we’re used to talking about points M1 to M6, and U1 to U3, these no longer exist by statute. The government sets out the minimum a newly-qualified teacher can be paid, and the maximum any teacher on the main scale can be paid; everything else in between is for schools to decide – normally based on the recommendation of their local authority. (Of course, many academies will also follow the national approach, so will also have the decision to make, although they can choose completely different pay scales if they prefer)

For that reason, the %age awards this year are only applied by the government to the minimum and maximum of each scale. It is then up to schools/LAs (and academies) to decide how to apply it elsewhere. What that means in practice is set out in some examples here:

A teacher on M1 who doesn’t move up to M2 (or its equivalent on its authority’s payscales) will automatically get the 3.5% increase, because the new minimum amount will increase (from £22,917 to £23,729 outside London)

A teacher on M1 who is offered a payrise by their school after appraisal or similar, will get whatever pay rise their school/LA policy allows for. For most schools that still means a move to the equivalent of the old M2 point (£24,728), based on the recommended pay scales that the unions publish together. Whether the amount of the M2 payment is increased by 3.5% is up to the LA’s pay policy. The government would argue that they are giving funding for all teachers to increase; an individual school.LA/academy may decide that it can’t afford that increase and take the opportunity to set pay points that are lower than the union recommendations.

Although the maximum of the main scale has been raised (from £33,824 to £35,008), it does not mean that all teachers currently paid at the old maximum are entitled to the new maximum. Again, its up to the policy of the local authority or academy trust.

The animation below is an attempt to show the main options for employers:

It would be a very odd choice to increase the pay of those at the top of the scale, while not increasing the pay of those on M5, or its equivalent. But arguably that is a choice open to local authorities & schools.

The fact that this confusion still lingers shows how few local authorities and academy trusts have moved away from the well-understood point system. I’d imagine there is a good likelihood that a majority of authorities will move all teachers up by the respective 3.5% / 2% / 1.5% increases that the government announced.

Just a quick blog, inspired by this much more detailed and challenging one by Solomon Kingsnorth:

NEW BLOG: Please RT! The latest installment of my 'Small is Beautiful' series where I re-write the primary curriculum. This time on how the bloated curriculum is harming reading outcomes for children. Less fluff, more fluency. https://t.co/SzWIIQoDh1

I think he has a point about the importance of vocabulary, and it’s something we can easily underestimate. It’s also something we can worry that we’ll never be able to resolve, because there’s no way of knowing what vocabulary will come up in any given text or test.

So I took a look at this year’s KS2 Reading test paper and tried to identify some of the vocabulary required to answer each question. It’s not every word in the texts, but it’s also not just the case of the 10 marks theoretically set aside for vocabulary. In fact, I think there were 80 or more examples of vocabulary which might not have been met by pupils who don’t read regularly:

Q1

approximately, survive

Q2

disguise

Q3

razor-like, powerful

Q4

majority

Q5

develops, newborn

Q6

hibernate

Q7

captivity, territory

Q8

puzzling

Q9

vital, essential

Q10

extinction, survive, supplies, diminishing, poaching, territory

Q11

adopt, reserve

Q12

challenge

Q13

Q14

Q15

fascinating,

Q16

protective, enfold

Q17

punished

Q18

mountainous, praised, lavishly

Q19

wounded, lame, circumstance

Q20

seized

Q21

Q22

vividly recall

Q23

frail, hobbled

Q24

hobbled, hesitate, peered

Q25

Q26

lit up

Q27

amusing, shocking, puzzling, comforting

Q28

arrives, injured

Q29

verses

Q30

suggests, bothered, basins, smelt

Q31

lifeless, ancestors

Q32

guardian

Q33

devices (left to my own devices)

Q34

recesses

Q35

dawned (dawned on me)

Q36

assorted, debris, network, grime

Q37

detemination, thorough

Q38

impression, evidence, frightening, intensity, cautiously

Q39

justice, efforts

Q40

inspect, fashioned, ought

The only questions that are counted as vocabulary marks are the 10 written in italics. And all those ones in bold? They’re listed as inference questions in the mark schemes. The challenge of inference is often about interpreting complex language as much as it is about guessing what the writer intended.

Perhaps more importantly, very few of those words are technically specific to the texts they appeared in. Even in the case of the non-fiction text about pandas, much of the apparently technical vocabulary is applicable to plenty of other contexts that children meet in the course of the curriculum.

The link here to ‘tier two’ vocabulary is clear: there is plenty of vocabulary here that would come up in a number of different contexts, both through fiction and non-fiction reading.

Which rather makes me think that Solomon is on to something important: a significant part of teaching reading is about getting them reading and reading to them.